Announcing the launch of an SMM program is easy. Navigating the challenges downstream – not so much
Like any other business endeavor, an SMM program is often confronted with uncertainty, challenges and obstacles. And because SMM is often perceived and practiced differently by different organizations, the nature of those challenges facing the discipline of strategic meetings management can vary widely.
Is SMM Working?
At the outset, the most fundamental question is, has strategic meetings management made good on its promises? Kari Wendel, senior director, SMM strategy and solutions, at CWT Meetings & Events, a specialized division of global travel management company Carlson Wagonlit, makes a surprising and startling observation about the current general state of SMM — exactly 10 years after she and a handful of other pioneers first developed and named the practice under the auspices of what was then known as the National Business Travel Association (NBTA).
Although many companies wrestle with more narrowly-defined challenges, Wendel sees one that eclipses all others. “One of the things we found elusive 10 years ago when the concept was being developed and many companies still find elusive today is really understanding what SMM is,” Wendel says. “And the other question is ‘Will it work? Will it actually deliver?’”
That is of primary importance going into 2014, Wendel says, because a growing number of SMM practitioners are starting to question their initiatives and struggling to define their real business benefits. Evaluating SMM is further complicated by the fact that the discipline is often perceived through a subjective or abstract lens, without clear objectives or benchmarks for assessing progress.
In retrospect, Wendel says, an underlying reason for the current waves of confusion and doubt is readily apparent. “I don’t think the industry did a good job of clearly and carefully articulating SMM’s value proposition over the past 10 years,” she says. “Over those 10 years, we’ve also seen the ‘SMM’ name applied to all kinds of things that it doesn’t apply to.”
The secret to overcoming such internal debates, or even existential challenges, is to start thinking more precisely of SMM as “a strategy for all of your meetings,” Wendel says. “By that I mean the aspiration or desire to achieve business success from your meetings.”
And that, she adds, is quite a different prism from the one used by many SMM practitioners, who are more narrowly focused on cost control, compliance or risk mitigation. Those organizations, Wendel says, must begin to look at their meeting activity more organically, within the broader business context of the organization, rather than as a line item in a corporate budget.
At the same time, she says, the industry needs more educational resources that focus on basic principles, best practices and core business goals. “There needs to be more education about core competencies,” she says. That need is critical, Wendel maintains, because SMM is now at a turning point as more and more companies are questioning whether their SMM program is delivering the benefits they initially expected.
If a survey were taken of every company that has launched an SMM program over the last 10 years, Wendel says, asking whether they believe their SMM program “has worked out the way you hoped or expected,” a majority would say no. And that means that the biggest SMM challenge of all going forward is whether SMM can survive and flourish for another 10 years.
Paying It Forward
Although she does not dispute Wendel’s analysis, Charlene Rabideau, senior vice president, operations and account management at BCD M&I, another industry-leading SMM consultant and meeting management service provider, sees her clients wrestling with different kinds of practical challenges.
“I see companies asking other kinds of questions, such as ‘Do we have the right level of SMM program? Are we capturing the right levels of data? Do we want to go deeper? Do we want to go global?’” says Rabideau, whose own experience goes back to the earliest days of SMM.
SMM’s inherent complexity and the fact that it is often assessed based on subjective, constantly-evolving criteria makes simple answers hard to come by. “Every company is different,” Rabideau says. “So what they’re aiming for with SMM differs a lot from organization to organization, depending on their culture and specific business goals. For example, we have some clients who are happy just to have meeting registration and consolidated sourcing. Others are more focused on contracting. And others are more focused on making sure everyone who plans meetings, even administrative assistants, is reporting the information management wants.”
However, she says, one widespread issue that will prompt a lot of discussion and debate in 2014 is how to pay for an SMM program. “A lot of companies now are looking at funding models and struggling with ways to come up with a methodology for how they charge departments or business units or geographical divisions to pay for it.”
Finding a clear-cut and viable funding model begins with determining the practical value of the program. Only then can a formula be created for allocating costs to various departments or business units. “Companies are starting to realize that they have to look at what is charged and how it’s charged,” she says. “That is certainly a hot topic right now.”
It’s even hotter, she says, for those companies that are now expanding their US SMM programs to international divisions or business units.
Based on her discussions with clients and what she hears anecdotally, Rabideau expects a majority of SMM practitioners will be deciding on an SMM funding model this year. The good news, she says, is that BCD M&I has counseled several major clients on how to navigate the mine field of a funding model and arrived at a sensible, workable solution that allows them to account for and allocate all business costs across the global organization. “So we know it can be done,” she says.
Cultural Barriers
For major companies that have succeeded in implementing an SMM program that does what management wanted it to do in the first place, a common challenge is the cultural obstacles that arise when the program is exported to foreign business units.
“If you’re doing a global implementation, the challenge is growing the adoption line into different countries,” says Carolyn Pund, senior manager, global strategic meetings management, at Cisco. “In the US, we’re really strong at getting the message out there and building a value proposition. In the UK, EMEA (Europe-Middle East and Africa) and Latin America, we are struggling a little bit. And the primary reason is just culture, or the way people do business.”
One reason, Pund says, is that “when you’re half a globe away and trying to implement SMM overseas, it sounds and feels like somebody is controlling you that doesn’t know your business from where they are. So having empathy for and understanding of that is very important. You have to understand those cultural issues. And you also have to understand how vendors operate in these different countries and how local culture affects the way they react to the kinds of things that corporate America might be asking them to do.”
A practical example of these cultural differences, Pund notes, is the general notion of a process. “The whole concept of SMM is driven by process and everyone doing something in a certain way,” she says. “At Cisco in the US, having various things driven by a process is normal. But in some Latin American or Asian countries, for example, many things are still done in an ‘old school’ way. And the practice of being accountable for every step in the meeting planning process from the time you send out an RFP to accounting for a budget is just not the same in many cases. They work on spread sheets or handshakes.”
Even more fundamentally, the notion of requiring strict compliance with a policy is sometimes seen as objectionable, Pund says. “It feels a little like Big Brother to them. And their reaction is, ‘Let me just get my job done. You’re impeding me.’”
Pund and her team, supported by senior management, have largely overcome the challenge by building relationships and trust, she says, adding that the same approach is what empowered Cisco to enjoy successful adoption and compliance in the US. “Once we have an opportunity to prove that our objective is their success by providing a service to them, things change,” she says.
The Question of Technology
Yet another common challenge to SMM adoption is the seamless integration of a meeting management technology platform.
Pershing, LLC, a BNY Mellon company, has spent the last two years addressing that daunting issue, says Tara DiLullo, the company’s vice president and group manager of corporate events.
Pershing elected to deploy the full suite of modules from Cvent, a leader in meeting technology. Such an enterprise-wide implementation is complex, DiLullo says, because of the well-known difficulty of gathering and aggregating all meeting-related data and integrating it into a single system that does everything the SMM program requires. “Having the right tools in place to be able to do that is not cheap,” DiLullo says. “So that’s one of the reasons, I think, there have been adoption issues with some companies.”
Last year was a breakthrough for Pershing as it made a successful transition to its new tech platform, DiLullo says. Now she’s aiming for the holy grail of meeting management technology – so-called end-to-end integration of the meeting planning and management/accounting process.
For 2014, they are fully implementing the Cvent platform, with the broader goal of truly being able to assess the efficiency and success of their meetings with a mouse click. “To do that used to take hours if not days of manpower,” DiLullo says. “And now all of that will be automated.”
The reason she and her management feel it’s so important, she says, is that “it’s the best way to really provide that holistic transparency on our meetings and events, including our volume of meetings, our budgets and our vendors.”
DiLullo’s current goal is getting everybody in the organization onboard. “We don’t have 100 percent adoption yet,” she says. “The system is only as effective as what users put into it. So in order to have the transparency we want, we need everybody on the same tool.”
The big three practical issues are adoption, stakeholder engagement and ability to easily use the tool, she says. Thus she and her team have been doing continuous training since early last year. They’ve developed what’s known as Cvent work groups to provide ongoing education, created a company-specific user’s manual and now host regular conference calls with stakeholders. All that has created real momentum.
The key to success is selling the practical benefits to meeting planners and other stakeholders, DiLullo says. “When they hear you speak first-hand about the benefits of the tool, then it’s easy to get people on board.”
It begins with getting senior management on board, so that they appreciate the value of the SMM program and understand the tools required to support it.
Thankfully, DiLullo says, she has been able to accomplish all that.